Salt Mines & Garages

Public domain is catching up with movies and Hollywood movies in particular. This is not a new development. Glitches in copyright procedures have made many titles like It's a Wonderful Life or Night of the Living Dead skid in and out of protection for years, to the delight of fringe operators and the frustration of corporates who considered them their property. However the assumption that the first all-talking motion pictures are now fair game is now widespread and films with 1929 or 1930 on the credits are beginning to proliferate in streaming and legacy media. 

Victor Sjöström's Tower of Lies -  Norma Shearer, Lon Chaney, William Haines.

I can't say my sympathies are divided on this matter. The studios have been indifferent to the fate of vintage material too often. MGM appear to have lost three of Victor Sjöström's films - the equivalent of burning three Picassos and hardly a sound business proposition. The lack of value in vintage film has become a self-fulfilling prophecy as titles that were not being shown never develop the new fan base that would create demand. Film Museums have a patchy record here, with horror stories about nitrate masters being burned as a fire hazard after making inferior dupes. Particularly series comics were considered to be beneath their dignity. That's you Bob Hope, Ossi Oswalder, Pierre Laquey and Jack Hulbert, on down through Adam Sandler. There were notable exceptions. Think London films or Agnes Varda with their impressive re-issue records. 

Well, there is some good news as a combination of profit seeking and serious scholarship is producing a current restricted demand for vintage film. Titles that we thought were gone forever are being re-printed from laboratory masters that have been entombed in salt mines or garages for a century, a heroically random process. We may have lost Victor Sjöström but Ben Stoloff is still with us.

 I rate Strictly Dishonorable a find. I can only attribute its low profile to the long term slackness of Universal’s re-issue mechanism and the laziness of the viewer community. That leaves us with the copy on You Tube, a TCM rip-off  - not ideal.

This one is Preston Sturges’ first screen credit, a barely adapted 1931 film version of the hit among his prolific Broadway offerings of the day. Even more significantly, it ushers in the succession of John Stahl sound melodramas, which are among the great pleasures of that early period - Back Street, Only Yesterday, Magnificent Obsession, Imitation of Life - less raucous than the Warner output, less ossified than the MGM prestige product. Stahl had been a significant figure during the silents, both as director (Memory Lane) and producer, heading up the Tiffany operation. Unfortunately, it is his later, largely machine-made Fox films (Leave Her to Heaven, Oh You Beautiful Doll!) which viewers are now likely to encounter.

Strictly Dishonorable opens not all that promisingly in a process screen car, with an argument between engaged couple Sidney Fox and George Meeker who are at the point where, having landed her, he doesn’t feel the need to be gallant any more, a message-heavy exchange (“marriage - it’s like going to jail”) It’s also the only sustained part of the film occuring outside the studio-built Speak Easy below apartments, which presumably takes the place of the original stage setting. There is a disconnect finding Meeker, a familiar face heavy in post war westerns and serials, charming the leading ladies of the Stahl films. He and ethnic comic William Ricciardi playing the manager, we are told were in the stage original.

Strictly Dishonorable - Ricciardi & Stone.

The bar decor, with the characters making entrances and departures and the vocal delivery af a cast not allowing pauses for laughs, lacking the clue of live audience feedback, suggest that we are in for one of those inadequately adapted theatre pieces as which early sound films were dismissed. Upstairs resident Lewis Stone drops by the bar, coming in for the night, and is persuaded to take a drink before turning in. Stone is the one who proves to be most in his element here, the star of several of Stahl’s silents he manages to provide the film’s most nuanced character and do it while becoming inebriated and recovering as the film runs.

Like the bickering couple in Merven Le Roy’s contemporary First National Playing Around (an interesting comparison), Fox and Meeker drop in but are about to blow the joint when she takes an interest in the arrival of fellow tenant, fresh from his opera singer gig, top billed Paul Lukas. He doesn’t actually kiss any hands but you get the idea. The body of the film is a comparison between the lives offered down home Mississsippi girl Fox by the contrasting potential partners. One of the more interesting dynamics is her Pre-Code willingness to be corrupted by the glittering urbanite, with upright ex-Judge Stone trying to protect the virtue she is losing interest in. I’m not the only one to be struck by the comparison with The Moon Is Blue.

Strictly Dishonorable - Lukas & Fox.

Another surprise casting touch is Sidney (my favorite Charlie Chan) Toler’s Irish (!) beat cop, manipulated by Judge Stone to provide further complications. We get a single inset of Meeker in a cell. That’s better than their other tries for film form, shots of the characters on the stairs linking the bar and the flats, conversations between the rear windows, the glimpse of the moon or jarring sound motivated close-ups of a phonograph disk or a ringing ‘phone. Actually more effective is the dialogue’s suggestion of a teaming Manhattan just outside the doors - Fox’s joyful visits to the Met, buying rail tickets ar Pen Station a block away, Lukas’ professional engagements. These possibly unconsciously linger from the Broadway origins. 

The film's strength is in the performances. Charm was Stahl’s stock in trade and the leads deliver that by the bucketful. Fox, made even more sympathetic by our knowledge of her short life, is irresistible, even if she comes on a bit decolette for the sweet thing character and Lukas nails the lady killer who is really a softie. It’s a delight to watch them come together despite Stone’s protective instinct. The film making (Karl Freund on camera, Jack Pierce make up) is in the hands of master craftsmen even if they haven’t quite figured sound out yet. The imperfections actually give it a kind of patina. The shonky but sharp copy still shows that. It might be an idea to catch this one fast. These tend to vanish.

The piece was remade in 1951 with Janet Leigh and Ezio Pinza. I remember that as agreeable but the only point in common I recall is the actual “strictly dishonorable” exchange.

The Devil's Holiday, from previous year 1930, looked even more promising, an ambitious Paramount talkie with a celebrity cast, coming from the accomplished Edmund Goulding

Effective opening in a featureless Chicago Grand Hotel switch room with operator Zazu Pitts, of whom we could have seen more, and sharpy Ned Sparks. His stone-faced interpretation effectively insulates him from the excesses the rest get lured into. Resident and hotel manicurist business owner Nancy Carroll is not taking calls and Zazu has Ned admitted to her suite, while Hotel security Wade Boteler sees off Nancy’s insistent “fiancé” Morgan Farley. Turns out that Ned has a business proposition. He wants Nancy to vamp a country visitor to sew up an agriculture machinery deal with a big-time Wheat Farmer (“He’s got so much money the bank won’t take it. They don’t have the room. They’d have to pay storage.”) where it looks like Ned’s time is being beaten by competitor Jed Prouty. 

Phillips Holmes, Jed Prouty, Nancy Carroll

Nancy pushes up his offered commission with an eye on financing her proposed trip to Paris and soon callow heir Phillip(s) Holmes is in the barber shop with Nancy dipping his fingers into her bowl. Phillip(s)’s stern brother James Kirkwood takes a dim view and has one of the film’s strongest scenes telling Nancy she’s predatory. She comes back “I’ve got people in this town that would cut your tongue out for half what you said to me, see?” 

Sure enough, there’s a fakey montage of wheat stems in front of a back cloth and Holmes is introducing new wife Nancy to stern dad (eminent silent actor and producer with a speciality in Jack London) Hobart Bosworth. (“His home, his church and his books - that’s father”) who, despite Kirkwood’s warning, is pondering that there must be some good in the girl if his son has married her. About now we O.D. on sin and redemption. Conviction wilts.

Director(producer-writer-composer) Edmund Goulding was one of the Hollywood greats, first for silent film scripts, including Tol’able David. His writing the Swedish En Kvinnas morgondag contains elements of The Devil’s Holiday plot. As a director, he headed up three decades of major studio productions, including multiples with Garbo and Bette Davis. Joan Crawford said she’d have gone on dancing on tables if it hadn’t been for Eddie Goulding. A lot of his work was ordinary (Sam Fuller wouldn’t believe Goulding had made Down Among the Sheltering Palms when they were both at Zanuck’s Fox) but Goulding hit substantial peaks with Sally Irene & Mary, Grand Hotel, Jezebel, The Old Maid, the Errol Flynn The Dawn Patrol and the Tyrone Power Nightmare Alley. Try and draw a straight line through that lot. His versatility made him the opposite of the auteur filmmaker model.

  Devil's Holiday - Kirkwood & Caroll

Goulding had planned on filming Devil’s Holiday with Jean Eagles in the lead but her substance abuse death prevented that. Gloria Swanson had headed up his previous and more accomplished The Tresspasser and was considered. That would have been a major re-write. His eventual production has a camera technique with trackings and selection of angles equal or superior to the work around him and his picture of the Grand Hotel as a busy enclosed world intrigues, anticipating his major MGM success but the rural community only gets near token delineation - Bosworth discussing threshers with Prouty or dismissing the urban idea of a Sunday off as the Devil’s Holiday. The interiors are particularly cheesy. The structure contrasting the two settings is submerged in the hysterics. Even the physical insertion of Viennese shrink, Paul Lukas again, into the final confrontation - his restraining hand coming into edge of frame when the leads emote, doesn’t provide a significantly sophisticated presence and of course the Marriage Bond is sacred.

This one does have all manner of interesting features but is still bogged in the early sound plot conventions that the front-runners were already shedding. It is one for the curious and a whole lot more are piling in behind it as copyrights become shaky. It's a good time to be a movie completist.

 

Devil's Holiday - Sparks & Carroll.

Strictly Dishonorable - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfrUDWTA6UI

Devil's Holiday - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkYdQcGmrzg

also Playing Around https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6YYDHHcPS4

Barrie Pattison 2026